Marooned in Realtime

  “But the techs have figured how to calibrate our generators. We can now project bobbles lasting anywhere from ten to two hundred years. They see theoretical limits on doing much better.”

  Avery nodded; he had been following those developments closely.

  “Sir, this has political significance.”

  “How so?”

  “We can turn what the Tinkers did to us in LA around. They bobbled their friends off the Tradetower to protect them. They know precisely how long it will last, and we don’t. It’s very clever: we’d look foolish putting a garrison at Big Bear to wait for our prisoners to ‘return.’ But it works the other way: Everyone knows now that bobbling is not permanent, is not fatal. This makes it the perfect way to take suspected enemies out of circulation. Some high Aztlán nobles were involved with this rescue. In the past we couldn’t afford vengeance against such persons. If we went around shooting everyone we suspect of treason, we’d end up like the European Directorate. But now…

  “I recommend we raid those we suspect of serious Tinkering, stage brief ‘hearings’—don’t even call them ‘trials’—and then embobble everyone who might be a threat. Our news service can make this very reasonable and nonthreatening: We have already established that the Tinkers are involved with high-energy weapons research, and quite possibly with bioscience. Most people fear the second far more than the first, by the way. I infiltrated the Tinkers by taking advantage of that fear.

  “These facts should be enough to keep the rest of the population from questioning the economic impact of taking out the Tinkers. At the same time, they will not fear us enough to band together. Even if we occasionally bobble popular or powerful persons, the public will know that this is being done without harm to the prisoners, and for a limited period of time—which we can announce in advance. The idea is that we are handling a temporary emergency with humanity, greater humanity than they could expect from mere governments.”

  Avery nodded, concealing his admiration. After reading of her performance in Mongolia, he had half expected Lu to be a female version of Christian Gerrault. But her ideas were sensible, subtle. When necessary she did not shrink from force, yet she also realized that the Authority was not all-powerful, that a balancing act was sometimes necessary to maintain the Peace. There really were people in this new generation who could carry on. If only this one were not a woman.

  “I agree. Miss Lu, I want you to continue to report directly to me. I will inform the North American section that you have temporary authority for all operations in California and Aztlán—if things go well, I will push for more. In the meantime, let me know if any of the ‘old hands’ are not cooperating with you. This is not the time for jealousy.”

  Avery hesitated, unsure whether to end the meeting or bring Lu into the innermost circle. Finally he keyed a command to his display flat and handed it to Lu. Besides himself—and perhaps Tioulang—she was the only person really qualified to handle Operation Renaissance. “This is a summary. I’ll want you to learn the details later; I could use your advice on how to split the operation into uncoupled subprojects that we can run at lower classifications.”

  Lu picked up the flat and saw the Special Material classification glowing at the top of the display. Not more than ten people now living had seen Special Materials; only top agents knew of the classification—and then only as a theoretical possibility. Special Materials were never committed to paper or transmitted; communication of such information was by courier with encrypted, booby-trapped ROMs that self-destructed after being read.

  Lu’s eyes flickered down the Renaissance summary. She nodded agreement as she read the description of Redoubt 001 and the bobble generator to be installed there. She pushed the page key and her eyes suddenly widened; she had reached the discussion that gave Renaissance its name. Her face paled as she read the page.

  She finished and silently handed him the flat. “It’s a terrifying possibility, is it not, Miss Lu?”

  “Yes sir.”

  And even more than before, Avery knew he had made the right decision; Renaissance was a responsibility that should frighten. “Winning with Renaissance would in many ways be as bad as the destruction of the Peace. It is there as the ultimate contingency, and, by God, we must win without it.”

  Avery was silent for a moment and then abruptly smiled. “But don’t worry; think of it as caution to the point of paranoia. If we do a competent job, there’s not a chance that we’ll lose.” He stood and came around his desk to show her to the door.

  Lu stood, but did not move toward the door. Instead, she stepped toward the wide glass wall and looked at the golden hills along the horizon.

  “Quite a view, isn’t it?” Avery said, a bit nonplussed. She had been so purposeful, so militarily precise—yet now she tarried over a bit of landscape. “I can never decide whether I like it more when the hills are summer gold or spring green.”

  She nodded, but didn’t seem to be listening to the chitchat. “There’s one other thing, sir. One other thing I wanted to bring up. We have the power to crush the Tinkers in North America; the situation is not like Europe. But craft has won against power before. If I were on the other side…”

  “Yes?”

  “If I were making their strategy, I would attack Livermore and try to bobble our generator.”

  “Without high-energy sources they can’t attack us from a distance.”

  She shrugged. “That’s our scientists’ solemn word. And six months ago they would have argued volumes that bobbles can’t be generated without nuclear power…But let’s assume that they’re right. Even then I would try to come up with some attack plan, some way of getting in close enough to bobble the Authority generator.”

  Avery looked out his window, seeing the beautiful land with Lu’s vision: as a possible battlefield, to be analyzed for fields of fire and interdiction zones. At first glance it was impossible to imagine any group getting in undetected, but from camping trips long ago he remembered all the ravines out there. Thank God the recon satellites were back in operation.

  That would protect against only part of the danger. There was still the possibility that the enemy might use traitors to smuggle a Tinker bobble generator into the area. Avery’s attention turned inward, calculating. He smiled to himself. Either way it wouldn’t do them any good. It was common knowledge that one of the Authority’s bobble generators was at Livermore (the other being at Beijing). And there were thousands of Authority personnel who routinely entered the Livermore Enclave. But that was a big area, almost fifty kilometers in its longest dimension. Somewhere in there was the generator and its power supply, but out of all the millions on Earth, only five knew exactly where that generator was housed, and scarcely fifty had access. The bobbler had been built under the cover of projects Jackson Avery contracted for the old LEL. Those projects had been the usual combination of military and energy research. The LEL and the US military had been only too happy to have them proceed in secret and had made it possible for the elder Avery to build his gadgets underground and well away from his official headquarters. Avery had seen to it that not even the military liaison had really known where everything was. After the War, that secrecy had been maintained: In the early days, the remnants of the US government still had had enough power to destroy the bobbler if they had known its location.

  And now that secrecy was paying off. The only way Hoehler could accomplish what Lu predicted was if he found some way of making Vandenberg-sized bobbles…The old fear welled up: That was just the sort of thing the monster was capable of.

  He looked at Lu with a feeling that surpassed respect and bordered on awe: She was not merely competent—she could actually think like Hoehler. He took her by the arm and led her to the door. “You’ve helped more than you can know, Miss Lu.”

  32

  Allison had been in the new world more than ten weeks.

  Sometimes it was the small things that were the hardest to get used to. You could forget for hours at a t
ime that nearly everyone you ever knew was dead, and that those deaths had been mostly murder. But when night came, and indoors became nearly as dark as outside—that was strangeness she could not ignore. Paul had plenty of electronic equipment, most of it more sophisticated than anything in the twentieth century, yet his power supply was measured in watts, not kilowatts. So they sat in darkness illuminated by the flatscreen displays and tiny holos that were their eyes on the outer world. Here they were, conspirators plotting the overthrow of a world dictatorship—a dictatorship which possessed missiles and nukes—and they sat timidly in the dark.

  Their quixotic conspiracy wasn’t winning, but, by God, the enemy knew it was in a fight. Take the TV: The first couple of weeks it seemed that there were hardly any stations, and those were mostly run by families. The Moraleses spent most of their viewing time with old recordings. Then, after the LA rescue, the Authority had begun around-the-clock saturation broadcasting similar to twentieth-century Soviet feeds, and as little watched: It was all news, all stories about the heinous Tinkers and the courageous measures being taken by “your Peace Authority” to make the world safe from the Tinker threat.

  Paul called those “measures” the Silvery Pogrom. Every day there were more pictures of convicted Tinkers and fellow-travelers disappearing into the bobble farm the Authority had established at Chico. Ten years, the announcers said, and those bobbles would burst and the felons would have their cases reviewed. Meantime, their property would also be held in stasis. Never in history, the audience was assured, had criminals and monsters been treated with more firmness or more fairness. Allison knew bullshit when she heard it; if she hadn’t been bobbled herself, she would have assumed that it was a cover for extermination.

  It was a strange feeling to have been present at the founding of the present order, and to be alive now, fifty years later. This great Authority, ruling the entire world—except now Europe and Africa—had grown from nothing more than that third-rate company Paul worked for in Livermore. What would have happened if she and Angus and Fred had made their flight a couple of days earlier, in time to return safely with the evidence?

  Allison looked out the mansion’s wide windows, into the twilight. Tears didn’t come to her eyes anymore when she thought about it, but the pain was still there. If they had gotten back in time, her CO might have listened to Hoehler. They just might have been able to raid the Livermore labs before the brazen takeover that was called the “War” nowadays. And apparently the “War” had been just the beginning of decades of war and plague, now blamed on the losers. Just a couple of days’ difference, and the world would not be a near-lifeless tomb, the United States a fading memory. To think that some lousy contractors could have brought down the greatest nation in history!

  She turned back into the room, trying to see the three other conspirators in the dimness. An old man, a skinny kid, and Miguel Rosas. This was the heart of the conspiracy? Tonight, at least, Rosas sounded as pessimistic as she felt.

  “Sure, Paul, your invention will bring them down eventually, but I’m telling you the Tinkers are all going to be dead or bobbled before that happens. The Peacers are moving fast.”

  The old man shrugged. “Mike, I think you just need something to panic over. A few weeks back it was the Peacers’ recon operation. Wili fixed that—more than fixed it—so now you have to worry about something else.” Allison agreed with Mike, but there was truth in Paul’s complaint. Mike seemed both haunted and trapped: haunted by what he had done in the past, trapped by his inability to do something to make up for that past. “The Tinkers have simply got to hide out long enough to make more bobblers and improve on ’em. Then we can fight back.” Paul’s voice was almost petulant, as though he thought that he had done all the hard work and now the Tinkers were incompetent to carry through with what remained. Sometimes Paul seemed exactly as she remembered him. But other times—like tonight—he just seemed old, and faintly befuddled.

  “I’m sorry, Paul, but I think that Mike he is right.” The black kid spoke up, his Spanish accent incongruous yet pleasant. The boy had a sharp tongue and a temper to go with it, but when he spoke to Paul—even in contradiction—he sounded respectful and diffident. “The Authority will not give us the time to succeed. They have bobbled the Alcalde del Norte himself. Red Arrow Farm is gone; if Colonel Kaladze was hiding there, then he is gone, too.” On a clear day, dozens of tiny bobbles could be seen about the skirts of the Vandenberg Dome.

  “But our control of Peacer recon. We should be able to protect large numbers of—” He noticed Wili shaking his head. “What? You don’t have the processing power? I thought you—”

  “That’s not the big problem, Paul. Jill and I have tried to cover for many of the Tinkers that survived the first bobblings. But see: The first time the Peacers fall on to one of these groups, they will have a contradiction. They will see the satellites telling them something different than what is on the ground. Then our trick is worthless. Already we must remove protection from a couple of the groups we agreed on—They were going to be captured very soon no matter what, Paul.” He spoke the last words quickly as he saw the old man straighten in his chair.

  Allison put in, “I agree with Wili. We three may be able to hold out forever, but the Tinkers in California will be all gone in another couple of weeks. Controlling the enemy’s comm and recon is an enormous advantage, but it’s something they will learn about sooner or later. It’s worthless except for short-term goals.”

  Paul was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, it sounded like the Paul she had known so long ago, the fellow who never let a problem defeat him. “Okay. Then victory must be our short-term goal…We’ll attack Livermore, and bobble their generator.”

  “Paul, you can do that? You can cast a bobble hundreds of kilometers away, just like the Peacers?” From the corner of her eye, Allison saw Wili shake his head.

  “No, but I can do better than in LA. If we could get Wili and enough equipment to within four thousand meters of the target, he could bobble it.”

  “Four thousand meters?” Rosas walked to the open windows. He looked out over the forest, seeming to enjoy the cool air that was beginning to sweep into the room. “Paul, Paul, I know you specialize in the impossible, but…In Los Angeles we needed a gang of porters just to carry the storage cells. A few weeks ago you wouldn’t hear of taking a wagon off into the eastern wilderness. Now you want to haul a wagonful of equipment through some of the most open and well-populated country on Earth.

  “And then, if you do get there, all you have to do is get those several tonnes of equipment within four thousand meters of the Peacer generator. Paul, I’ve been up to the Livermore Enclave. Three years ago. It was police service liaison with the Peacers. They’ve got enough firepower there to defeat an old-time army, enough aircraft that they don’t need satellite pickups. You couldn’t get within forty kilometers without an engraved invitation. Four thousand meters range is probably right inside their central compound.”

  “There is another problem, Paul.” Wili spoke shyly. “I had thought about their generator, too. Someday, I know we must destroy it—and the one in Beijing. But Paul, I can’t find it. I mean, the Authority publicity, it gives nice pictures of the generator building at Livermore, but they are fake. I know. Since I took over their communication system, I know everything they say to each other over the satellites. The generator in Beijing is very close to its official place, but the Livermore one is hidden. They never say its place, even in the most secret transmissions.”

  Paul slumped in his chair, defeat very obvious. “You’re right, of course. The bastards built it in secret. They certainly kept the location secret while the governments were still powerful.”

  Allison stared from one to the other and felt crazy laughter creeping up her throat. They really didn’t know. After all these years they didn’t know. And just minutes before, she had been hurting herself with might-have-beens. The laughter burbled out, and she didn’t try to stop it
. The others looked at her with growing surprise. Her last mission, perhaps the last recon sortie the USAF ever flew, might yet serve its purpose.

  Finally, she choked down the laughter and told them the cause for joy. “…so if you have a reader, I think we can find it.”

  There followed frantic calls for Irma, then even more frantic searches through attic storage for the old disk reader. An hour later, the reader sat on the living room table. It was bulky, gray, the Motorola insignia almost scratched away. Irma plugged it in and coaxed it to life. “It worked fine years ago. We used it to copy all our old disks onto solid storage. It uses a lot of power though; that’s one reason we gave it up.”

  The reader’s screen came to life, a brilliant glow that lit the whole room. This was the honest light Allison remembered. She had brought her disk pack down, and undone the combination lock. The disk was milspec, but it was commercial format; it should run on the Motorola. She slipped it into the reader. Her fingers danced across the keyboard, customizing off routines on the disk. Everything was so familiar; it was like suddenly being transported back to the before.

  The screen turned white. Three mottled gray disks sat near the middle of the field. She pressed a key and the picture was overlaid with grids and legends.

  Allison looked at the picture and almost started laughing again. She was about to reveal what was probably the most highly classified surveillance technique in the American arsenal. Twelve weeks “before,” such an act would have been unthinkable. Now, it was a wonderful opportunity, an opportunity for the murdered past to win some small revenge. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” she said into the silence. “We’re looking down at—I should say ‘through’—Livermore.” The date on the legend was 01JUL97.